4 ms·

Can you provide examples? I just see this as an example of Gish gallop creating a situation were multiple claims are put forward and it is hard to counter them

Can you provide examples? I just see this as an example of Gish gallop creating a situation were multiple claims are put forward and it is hard to counter them all at the same time.

whatshisface 5y ago
The article contains many contradicting claims from separate people, spanning the spectrum. It is reporting on basically everything the author could get, which is confusing but reflects well on the idea of journalism. I will reproduce a couple examples but there are more. >“We were handed a turd,” he said. “And I had to take that turd and turn it into a diamond. And that’s what I think we did.” That claim states that the data was terrible, but someone thinks they found something good in it. >“So our team said, we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” Mr. Merritt said on Wednesday, the second day of the symposium. This makes it sound like nothing good was found. >He had offered $5 million to any in-person attendee who can disprove his claims. The offer is no longer on the table, Mr. Merritt said. This claims that the $5M is not on the table right now. >Kurt Olsen, a lawyer on Mr. Lindell’s team said there were multiple sources of the data that Mr. Lindell claims to have, and did not confirm that Mr. Mongtomery was the source of the data. He also clarified that the $5 million challenge has not been canceled and that Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information. This claims that it is.
- tptacek 5y ago
  They published hex dumps of RTF files of IP address lists, and a corpus of "lorem ipsum"-style Chinese text scraped from ad copy. You can see it on Github. There is no reason any of us need to take this seriously, or to be at all skeptical of news stories about how it's a scam.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    I think you're possibly misinterpreting it - the news article is unequivocally clear about what its sources are saying, the sources are the ones who are contradicting each other. We are so used to newspaper editorialization / tunnel vision that to see two disagreeing sources on the same page is surprising.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      We don't have to parse sources or litigate whether they're "contradicting" each other. We can just look on Github at the data Lindell released.
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        Observing that the people being quoted don't have a straight story between them is hardly litigation, it's a fairly pertinent indicator of the epistemic state of those involved. A newspaper intent on presenting a cohesive narrative and not confusing the reader would have paved over the contradictions, destroying this valuable signal by only printing quotes that agreed with each other. That's my point, that the author is doing something valuable, that may appear on the surface to be "bad writing," if judged the way we judge fiction, but is in fact good reporting.
        tptacek 5y ago
        I don't read it that way. Read back to your first comment on the thread. You've depicted a live debate about whether Lindell has any evidence for his conspiracy theory. We have the data he released. The debate, to whatever extent it existed originally, is no longer live.
        jollybean 5y ago
        I think you're misunderstanding the point the OP is making. He's talking about the nature of communication, not about the actual underlying facts of whether the data is gibberish or not. We know what happened in the election. We know roughly how well the vaccines are working and how safe they are. That's not the problem, the problem is how the information is presented, communicated, how clearly repudiated evidence can still be perpetuated as 'evidence'. In particular, the OP's point about how there are contradicting statements in the article is really interesting: this should be common as there are a lot of disagreements in the real world, and yet, we don't really see a lot of that in most journalism which betrays the fact that it's likely a lot of journalists are actually advocating for an idea, and selecting the quotes necessary to make that case. Which is more common than not. I have to admit personally being confused by the apparent duplicity of the quotes ... and it took me a minute to realize that this was actually valuable information, that we rarely see.
- stnmtn 5y ago
  For the $5M, it looks like that is showing how much disconnect there is between members of the same "Team" Merritt says it's off the table, but Kurt Olsen says it's still on the table and that "Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information" None of those claims contradict each other, the article is saying "This person said this, another said this" and is showing the absolute chaos and buffonery that Mike Lindell and "team" are doing.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    >None of those claims contradict each other >Merritt says it's off the table, but Kurt Olsen says it's still on the table and that "Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information" Those two claims contradict each other, but the paper is reporting them accurately. The fact that people are having so much trouble parsing this goes to show the extent to which we have become accustomed to newspaper editorialization. :-)

Can you provide examples? I just see this as an example of Gish gallop creating a situation were multiple claims are put forward and it is hard to counter them all at the same time.

whatshisface 5y ago

The article contains many contradicting claims from separate people, spanning the spectrum. It is reporting on basically everything the author could get, which is confusing but reflects well on the idea of journalism. I will reproduce a couple examples but there are more. >“We were handed a turd,” he said. “And I had to take that turd and turn it into a diamond. And that’s what I think we did.” That claim states that the data was terrible, but someone thinks they found something good in it. >“So our team said, we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” Mr. Merritt said on Wednesday, the second day of the symposium. This makes it sound like nothing good was found. >He had offered $5 million to any in-person attendee who can disprove his claims. The offer is no longer on the table, Mr. Merritt said. This claims that the $5M is not on the table right now. >Kurt Olsen, a lawyer on Mr. Lindell’s team said there were multiple sources of the data that Mr. Lindell claims to have, and did not confirm that Mr. Mongtomery was the source of the data. He also clarified that the $5 million challenge has not been canceled and that Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information. This claims that it is.

tptacek 5y ago
They published hex dumps of RTF files of IP address lists, and a corpus of "lorem ipsum"-style Chinese text scraped from ad copy. You can see it on Github. There is no reason any of us need to take this seriously, or to be at all skeptical of news stories about how it's a scam.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  I think you're possibly misinterpreting it - the news article is unequivocally clear about what its sources are saying, the sources are the ones who are contradicting each other. We are so used to newspaper editorialization / tunnel vision that to see two disagreeing sources on the same page is surprising.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    We don't have to parse sources or litigate whether they're "contradicting" each other. We can just look on Github at the data Lindell released.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Observing that the people being quoted don't have a straight story between them is hardly litigation, it's a fairly pertinent indicator of the epistemic state of those involved. A newspaper intent on presenting a cohesive narrative and not confusing the reader would have paved over the contradictions, destroying this valuable signal by only printing quotes that agreed with each other. That's my point, that the author is doing something valuable, that may appear on the surface to be "bad writing," if judged the way we judge fiction, but is in fact good reporting.
      - tptacek 5y ago
        I don't read it that way. Read back to your first comment on the thread. You've depicted a live debate about whether Lindell has any evidence for his conspiracy theory. We have the data he released. The debate, to whatever extent it existed originally, is no longer live.
        jollybean 5y ago
        I think you're misunderstanding the point the OP is making. He's talking about the nature of communication, not about the actual underlying facts of whether the data is gibberish or not. We know what happened in the election. We know roughly how well the vaccines are working and how safe they are. That's not the problem, the problem is how the information is presented, communicated, how clearly repudiated evidence can still be perpetuated as 'evidence'. In particular, the OP's point about how there are contradicting statements in the article is really interesting: this should be common as there are a lot of disagreements in the real world, and yet, we don't really see a lot of that in most journalism which betrays the fact that it's likely a lot of journalists are actually advocating for an idea, and selecting the quotes necessary to make that case. Which is more common than not. I have to admit personally being confused by the apparent duplicity of the quotes ... and it took me a minute to realize that this was actually valuable information, that we rarely see.
stnmtn 5y ago
For the $5M, it looks like that is showing how much disconnect there is between members of the same "Team" Merritt says it's off the table, but Kurt Olsen says it's still on the table and that "Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information" None of those claims contradict each other, the article is saying "This person said this, another said this" and is showing the absolute chaos and buffonery that Mike Lindell and "team" are doing.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >None of those claims contradict each other >Merritt says it's off the table, but Kurt Olsen says it's still on the table and that "Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information" Those two claims contradict each other, but the paper is reporting them accurately. The fact that people are having so much trouble parsing this goes to show the extent to which we have become accustomed to newspaper editorialization. :-)